Creating Translations for Analysis Services Tabular 2016

Problem

We just started using Analysis Services 2016 and we have created a Tabular model.
One of the new features is the ability to add translations for the different metadata
objects, however this requires editing some JSON file. Is there an easier way?

Solution

Translations is a new feature of Analysis Services (SSAS) Tabular 2016. You can
now add translations supporting many different languages for different objects of
a Tabular model such as: the name of the model, the table names, all the column
names and the names of the various measures.

SSAS Multidimensional already supported translations for quite some time now.
It also has the capability to translate metadata, but you can also specify alternative
translation columns for the actual data (for example, English Product Name, French
Product Name, Spanish Product Name and so on). Tabular doesn’t support this
at the moment, you cannot translate the actual data, only the metadata.

Creating a Translation with the Tabular Translator

The first step is to create a translation file. Navigate to Model > Translations >
Manage Translations.

In the dialog, select the language for which you want to create a translation:

Add the language to the model and click on Export selected languages.
You can now save a template for the translation as a JSON file.

Open the Tabular Translator tool and import the just created JSON file.

Make sure the culture in the header matches the language from the translation.
In the table, you can find all the metadata objects of the model: the name of the
model itself, the table names, the column names and the names of the measures.

The editor allows you to easily specify the following properties:

TranslatedCaption

TranslatedDescription

TranslatedDisplayFolder

The editor lists the type of the object, along with the name, description and
the display folder of the object. You cannot change any of the original properties
though.

Let’s create some translations for the City table:

Click the button Save Updates. We can verify in the JSON file that the
translations have been added.

Now we can import the translations back into the model. Navigate to Model >
Translations > Import Translations. If the translation already exists for
the specified language, we’re going to overwrite it.

We can easily test the translation with the Analyze in Excel functionality.

In the pop-up, make sure to select the correct culture before launching Excel:

We can view the results of the translation in a Pivot Table:

Conclusion

With the SSAS Tabular Translator, we can easily create translations without manually
editing a JSON file. Make sure you don’t change the name of the original
objects when you’re editing a translation, or a mismatch might occur.

Next Steps

You can find more info about translations in SSAS Tabular in the following
articles: